The Road To Madikeri

The waiter appears with a glass of black coffee as soon as I take a table in the courtyard restaurant; the first hint of dawn is tinging the sky to the east, the crows and kites starting their morning reveille. At 7 o'clock I leave a 10 Rupee note under my empty glass, collect my bag, and leave the key to room 104 at the front desk. I walk down an almost deserted Dhanavanthri Road until I find a rickshaw pulled up on the dusty verge, the wallah waking himself up with a cup of chai from the little wooden road-side shack that never seems to close; his hair is tousled and his shirt crumpled, and it takes him a few moments to register his first fare of the day. It is common for drivers to live in their rickshaws, and many only go home to their villages and families for a day or two when earnings permit the luxury; they live a harsh, unforgiving life, renting their vehicles by the week with no guarantee of covering even that modest cost. Before we reach Mysore's City Bus Stand, the wallah coasts into a garage and asks apologetically if I would pay my fare now so that he can afford some fuel. He buys 20 Rupees worth of petrol and puts the other ten in his back pocket. It will go towards the costs of rickshaw hire, and sustaining himself; and, if it is a good day, there will be a few coins left over to take home to his family.
An Indian city's bus stand is at the tumultuous heart of its already chaotic transport system; at any hour of the day, it is a thriving, animated circus of noise, light, and movement. Where Mysore Junction railway station follows the pattern of logic laid down by timetables, platforms, and bilingual loudspeaker announcements, the City Bus Stand works under the premises of guesswork, intuition, and some sort of unspoken collective understanding. I ask a brown-uniformed official, who carries a clipboard and seems to be some sort of controller or despatcher, where the bus to Madikeri will leave from; he gestures in the vague direction of the parking bays at the back of the building, where a long line of battered coaches with homemade destination signs in Hindi and Kanadian stand. At the front of each bus there are more uniformed people, and crowds of passengers urgently negotiating prices and arguing over luggage fees, buying tickets and passing bags and suitcases through bus windows to unseen friends and relatives inside.
Like Indian Railways, the state operated buses have different classes. Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) offers the choice of Ordinary, Semi-Deluxe, Super-Deluxe and Ultra-Deluxe travel; increasing in increments of less discomfort, more cost, and fewer and shorter stops, they run everywhere but to the smallest towns and villages. I find a Ultra-Deluxe from Bangalore that is making the run to Mangalore over the Western Ghats via Madikeri and pay the conductor 105 Rupees for a reserved seat - twice the price of a train journey of comparable distance, had a line serving the Coorg region of Karnataka ever been built. The bus is a dented Ashoka Leyland with blacked-out windows, balding tyres and frayed reclining seats; there is no luggage hold, and my bag is too big to fit in the overhead rack; I wedge it between the back of the drivers seat and the transmission housing, chaining it to a handrail for security. I buy water and some cashews for breakfast, smoke a Wills Classic, and push my way down the aisle of the already crowded bus to my seat. The driver sounds his horn as we pull slowly out of the bus station, provoking a stampede of last minute passengers who shoehorn themselves into every inch of standing space left; the conductor turns on a large television at the front of the bus, inserts a video in the player and adjusts the volume to an ear-splitting, distorted scream. The Ultra-Deluxe is what is known as a Videobus service - one of India's most disagreeable ways to travel - but it is too late to change now that we are on the main Eliwala Road. The man sitting next to me unpacks the breakfast of iddli and copra chutney he has bought from the bhavan in the bus stand, sprawls himself out in and stares fixedly at the screen as an attractive Indian actress launches into a screeching love song against the backdrop of a misty Punjabi plain. I slide my window open and watch the streets of Mysore slip by, trying to ignore the deafening music and crowding limbs of my travelling companion.
I have never understood having entertainment on transport other than, perhaps, aircraft. There is little to see at 39000 feet at night on a long flight, but in daylight, I would much rather look out of the window and cross reference what I am seeing with the interactive map on the seat-back screen. But on land - whether in a car, a train, or a bus - there is always something interesting, exciting, bizarre or occasionally shocking to see - day and night. Why watch a film on a Videobus or a car's seat-back DVD player when the world is outside your window? Are we that indifferent to what is happening around us, whether it is the brightly dressed women working in the paddy fields of Tamil Nadu, or the old man walking his dog through a housing estate in Milton Keynes? It takes the best part of fifty minutes and a lot of stops for even more passengers to pile aboard before we are on the open road with Mysore behind us. The road varies from brand new dual carriageway - where once, we are overtaken by another bus driving head-on into the oncoming traffic on the other side of the central barrier - to little more than a beaten earth track through dusty farmland; the driver bullies rickshaws and scooters out of the way with his horn, and keeps the bus a scant couple of feet from the bumper of the vehicle in front. I have no choice but to slide my window shut against the choking dust thrown up from the road, and endure the airless, sweat-scented atmosphere inside and din of the television with gritted teeth.
At 11 o'clock we swing into the bus stand at Bylakuppa for a ten minute break; I fight my way to the door and stand on the forecourt with a Wills Classic and my map. I estimate we are less than 50 kilometres from Madikeri - which is borne out by the blue outline of the Coorg hills on the horizon - a journey of perhaps an hour and a half at most. I buy a cup of chai, more water, and get back on the bus. The handful of passengers who got off at Bylakuppa have been replaced with twice as many more, and it takes me several minutes to convince the occupant of my reserved seat that under no circumstances is he staying in it. There is no deference to age, gender, or infirmity on Indian buses - unlike travelling on Indian Railways; pregnant women and tired old men will stand for a journey of hours while younger and fitter passengers doze contentedly in the reclining seats. To offer my place to the exhausted old lady with her bags of market vegetables would be a breach of social etiquette, and could be misinterpreted in any number of ways. There is a momentary respite from the pummelling noise from the television while the tape is changed; the next film is what appears to be an action/comedy/romance/musical filmed in the 1970s, with creaking, garishly painted sets, awful contemporary costumes, and lengthy and entirely unconvincing set-piece martial arts fights. If anything, it is even louder than before.
After an hour I begin to doubt my estimate of being in Madikeri before one o'clock; the road rises steadily through the lower hills, then begins a twisting ascent into the mountainous coffee growing region of Coorg. The hairpin bends are so tight, the climbs so steep, that the bus grinds uphill at less than walking pace in first gear. The scenery, though, is idyllic: coffee bushes and pepper vines growing under the shade of sandalwood and palm trees; thick forest jungle and blossoming jacaranda; tiny villages and plantations with names like Fairlands and Hillyside Estates hidden behind white painted picket fences; rivers and mountain streams sparkling in the sun, unpolluted and undisturbed. When I open my window, the air is fresh and warm, free of the heat and fumes of Mysore which seemed at the time a relief after Chennai. We stop at Kushal Nagar just after one o'clock; a sign outside the bus stand tells me it is still 30 kilometres to Madikeri. The road becomes ever steeper, the forest thicker and lusher, as we toil up the last stretch to the outskirts of Madikeri and drive the short distance to the bus stand - just as the end credits of the terrible film roll down the screen, as if they had been timed to the very second. I retrieve my bag from behind the driver's seat, dust off the prints where it has been used as a footrest, thank the conductor, and step down into the refreshing air of Madikeri - or Mercara as it is known in Kanadian, the Karnatakan language - capital of Coorg (Kodagu), an area proudly described as The Scotland Of India by those who live here.
The bus stand is at the bottom of a hill behind the main Chouk. I follow a narrow lane between the backs of some ugly concrete office blocks and climb a steep flight of stone steps up to Mahadev Pet and the rickshaw stand opposite the Canara Bank. The entire town centre would fit inside the confines of Mysore's Devajara Market; there are two or three hotels - each with a bar and restaurant - a handful 'Meals Ready' halls, a couple of dozen 'General Sales' and beedi-and-paan stores, and the odd 'Coorg Honey-Coffee-Cardamom' shop serving the few tourists who pass through. A small traffic circle in front of the public bus stand, where old and decrepit coaches wait to ferry villagers out into the nearby countryside and backwaters not served by KSRTC, is presided over by a policeman in a crisp uniform, complete with white gloves and bush hat. There isn't very much traffic for him to direct, apart from the endless stream of buses that grind up and down the hilly main road. I ask a rickshaw driver to take me to the Hotel Valley View - part of the same government run chain as the Mayura Hoysala - but dismiss any thoughts of staying there as soon as we reach the main gate. The ramshackle colonial building that was the original accommodation has been elbowed out of the way by a new, starkly modern, characterless block, which sits in the middle of a waste ground of builders debris. The car park is a field of rubble, and a apart from a bicycle leaning against the hotel wall, it is completely empty. The tariff board facing the road asks for 1000 Rupees a night, and I doubt many people get any further than this before turning around. The silhouettes of five or six staff gather behind the smoked glass lobby doors and then drift away in disappointment as my rickshaw u-turns back onto Race Course Road. I find the Rajhandi Hotel a hundred metres below Raja's Seat - once the site of the Maharajas' belvedere overlooking the valley below - and check into a room with a view of the garden and the two resident ducks that waddle around the lawn and paddle in the small pond.
The Rajhandi is built into a hillside on the edge of town, its four floors descending from Raja's Seat Road to the car park entrance on a narrow lane called Gowhli Street. I sit at my window table with a room service bottle of Kingfisher and look out over the town. Ringed by low green hills, the brightly painted bungalows with their red terracotta roof tiles stand shoulder to shoulder with the minarets and domes of the rajas' tombs, surrounded by tall trees and colourful splashes of bougainvillea; it is so quiet that I can hear only distant birdsong and the whisper of a faint breeze in the palms along the lane.
I walk down Gowhli Street into town and eat a simple meal of stewed pumpkin and rice in the Capitol Bar And Restaurant. I am their only western customer; the houseboys serve me with something akin to reverence for a rare European visitor, and the manager makes a point of coming to my table to welcome me. I tell him, in all honesty, that his food is excellent, and leave a generous tip for their obliging service. On my way back to the Rajhandi I notice a sign for 'Motorbike On Hire' with an arrow pointing to a rickety staircase and a first floor office lettered Nisarga Tourism. Half an hour later I sit in the hotel bar with a Kingfisher and plan a route for tomorrow using the hand-drawn maps that came with the Yamaha Gladiator. A web of minor roads radiates out from Madikei and connects countless tiny settlement and plantation estates with the capital; and more destinations lie off the main Mysore Road that my bus crawled up today. But for my first trip, I decide on a short orienteering ride to Abbi Falls and back - just to make sure that both the bike, and myself, can negotiate Coorg's roads.